Projects

Rice Tea has been all about the drafts. At first, I created a series of handwritten outlines. In the beginning they were short. The one I have on hand from 2006 was 6 pages. These grew with time. Six pages became Thirty. Thirty became fourty-five.

I began work on the actual content for the book pretty much as soon as the outlines were done. I started writing that in mid-July, and I had a first draft ready in early October. The second draft was finished just finished a few days ago, about a month later.

So this is where we’re at now. Next up is a revision of the book by my mom. She’s not a hacker, nor is she terribly savvy with technology. But she’s a kick ass linguistics teacher, and she can spot poor sentence structure from a kilometer away. Actually, she’s plain kick ass in general.

I’ve been looking at the logs for ricetea.ca, and if I’m lucky I’ll get one visitor a day. Eh well. The rest are just search bots. I have banned Websense bots from the site. I was tired of seing their bots bomb my site with fake user agents.

Picked up the new book by Mafiaboy. I thought it could give me some insights on how the RCMP handled it’s targeted hackers. To that end, it succeeded. However, I really could not recommend this book to others. The writing style is very sloppy, with poor sentence structure and an unending stream of redundant passages. There’s also lots of fluff that’s in there for what I can only assume to increase the page count. For instance, he devotes three pages to describing members of his old hacker gang, elaborately talking about every single one. Also a sore point are the numerous comments he inserts to shed off his scriptkiddy image, only to reinforce that perception at some later point with his own words.

If you want to buy the book, buy it for it’s comical value. He really tries hard to make Efnet sound like some kind of evil hackerz-0nly club. He also keeps talking about how good he was, how much damage he had caused, blah blah blah. He’ll quote CNN many times over. He’ll use superlatives when talking about himself. It makes reading this feel like some kind of ego-boosting exercise rather than a proper retelling of the events.

Inspired by some of the great people at 2600 Ottawa, I’ve decided to learn some more C. I had a very basic knowledge with my first foray into the language a few years ago, when I discovered the excellent Practical C Programming by Steve Oualline. At the last meeting, I was encouraged to pick up Kernighan and Ritchie’s (The) C Programming Language. So I did.

Now I hate doing basic programming examples. I rather get a grasp of the language and whatever unique features it has, and start programming right away. Thus, my new project: an automated stock market trader.

The basic design: the program looks at the stock market by pulling live quotes from Google. It logs the quotes. It then looks at the trends over the last hour, few hours, days, week, and month to formulate an opinion as to whether to buy/sell/short sell. The idea being that if it thinks that it can at least recapture the revenue for the cost of the trade, that it will act out.

The program will keep track of personal finances, will include a few finance protection schemes, and will display everything through ncurses on the screen. I’m imagining 6 split screen windows with text-based graphs showing the current state of the various stocks. Each window will also include the current value of the shares, and what the computer’s call is.

The program will also poll Google News to see if there’s any news on the stock item. If it detects news, and sees the value fall, it’ll be more aggressive in pulling out from the stock. The program would poll each stock every 5 minutes.

I had another cool idea, but Google kinda beat me to it. I’ll talk about it at the next 2600 meeting. As for Rice Tea, it’s going very well. If you look at the last few updates, you’ll see that the page count hasn’t changed much. What I’m doing is that I’m going over the book from start to end, editing it, so that it’s easier to read. I’ve sacrificed a bit of technical correctness in terms of the terminology used so that it’s easier for a wider audience to grasp.

I find that I’m really cutting down on the paragraph size. I never realized how wordy it was until I started editing the book. Same message, just alot less words to say it. And easier to understand.

Win-win!

Progress really slowed down on Rice Tea. The main factor was the starting of the new job. For my first weeks there, I’d just come home from work and collapse. On some days, I went to bed at 7PM. I could not do any university work or writing.

Then I had two days where they had nothing for me to do at work. So I wrote. And wrote. In fact, I wrote twenty pages. As a point of comparison, I had only managed to write two pages since I had started my new job.

I’ve now reached the 100 page milestone. Don’t count on returning to summer-level production. Perhaps in three weeks, after my job here is done, and university is complete (forever!), I’ll have the time I need.

The next update on this blog pertaining to Rice Tea will be to tell you that it’s done. Keep up to date on the book’s own website, ricetea.ca!